Cashing Out

by SM Reine

  But Dana was falling behind. She’d hoped that all the vampires she’d been killing in the sewers lately would slow him down, but Mohinder had already started his plan. “I know how Mohinder is planning to distribute silver to make the rest of your pack go wild or drop dead,” Dana said. “I’ll tell you once you’ve agreed to help me stop him.”

  Tormid scoffed. “Help you? The Hunting Club?”

  “They won’t be involved.” She couldn’t let them see her like this. As far as they knew, Dana was already dead, and it was better that way. Easier than trying to say goodbye. Easier than going back into their arms, only to blow away on the wind as a pile of ash in a few days anyway.

  “You’re a liar,” Tormid said. “Why the fuck should we help you?” The vehemence in his words got the pack all excited. One of his guys threw his head back and howled. It echoed throughout the sewers.

  “I’m not asking you or giving you an option. You are going to help me.”

  Tormid sauntered forward. “Tell you what. If you can beat me in a fair fight, then I’ll help you. And if I win, I get to stake you.”

  Dana laughed. “You’d rather stake me than get my information on Mohinder?”

  “The world doesn’t orbit around you, McIntyre. You’re not the only person capable of holding this city together and you’re not the only person who can stop the bad guys. Prove to me you’re strong enough to be an asset, and you can stay.”

  “Fine, on one extra condition.” She cracked her knuckles. “I don’t want a fair fight. I want you to throw your whole pack at me. And when I’ve got you all weeping on the floor like babies, you’re going to do every gods-damned thing I say without questioning it.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, boss,” one of the shifters whispered to Tormid.

  But the raven shifter said, “Done.”

  Dana had had worse ideas than fighting an entire pack of shifters at once, but not many.

  It might have been her most suicidal thought, though.

  On the bright side, if she was gonna die, getting torn apart by a bunch of oversized animals would be a pretty bad-ass way to go down.

  They gave her a minute. Set aside the wooden stake. Offered her clothes. Dana declined. She’d wrecked her jeans and shirt hours earlier slaughtering vampires; a freshly fed bloodless was awfully bloody when torn to pieces. Dana didn’t have modesty to protect and planned to wreck her clothes with shifter blood anyway. She might as well stay half-naked for the time being.

  “Can I get you a weapon?” Tormid asked.

  “Nah,” Dana said.

  And she punched him in the face.

  At least, she tried to punch him in the face.

  It turned out that Tormid expected dirty tricks from Dana. He turned to the side at the last moment and Dana kept going—too fast to stop. Her momentum carried her into the wall and embedded her fist wrist-deep into the concrete.

  That slowed her long enough for Tormid to swing for her kidneys.

  She delivered a donkey kick to his nuts.

  Tormid staggered and shouted. His cry of pain was enough to bring the rest of the pack in to attack, too.

  They weren’t as slow as they had been at first. They’d realized how fast Dana could move, and now they weren’t holding back in the slightest.

  She was swarmed.

  Dana felt the hands—they clutched at her shoulders, hips, neck. Trying to rip her apart. That was her guess, at least. She wasn’t going to let them apply pressure.

  She wrenched her fist out of the wall and took a huge chunk of concrete with it. Dana swung it around like a shot put and pulverized some guy’s head. “Fuck!” It was the only word he could get out before he splattered in the muck.

  He was replaced by another of Tormid’s men, who linebackered Dana into a pump. Spine hit metal. Metal bent before vampire bone. The pipe cracked open, fluid gushed out, and Dana saw it emerging like liquid diamond erupting from a copper vein. She ducked underneath it. Let the force of the blast throw the shifter backward.

  Dana cackled wildly as she leaped behind another pump, and another, keeping them between herself and the shifters. She was wedging herself into the narrow maintenance passage behind the equipment. Making sure the shifters could only come at her one at a time. Make it easier to pick them off.

  “I don’t know how you thought you could beat me!” she shouted into the room. It felt like she had to slow herself down to be understood, to keep from speaking a million words per minute. “I might be untrained, but I’m still better than all of you!”

  “McIntyre!”

  Dana zeroed in on Tormid, who hadn’t bothered trying to follow her into tight confines. He was a few feet away in knee-deep sludge. He was holding a knife.

  He slashed his own throat.

  It wasn’t a silver weapon, so the cut wouldn’t last. But it was deep enough that blood fountained over his chest.

  “Being an untrained vampire is more dangerous than you know,” Tormid said. The words bubbled in his shredded throat, squeezed out of his reddened face. The cut must have hurt. A lot. The fact that he showed pain only made the blood more tempting. It made Dana want to kill him.

  He dug the knife in again as soon as it began to heal. Fresh blood flowed.

  “Thit,” she said through her freshly elongated fangs.

  The smell of blood turned off her brain. Like it crowded out all those rational hunter thoughts and replaced them with nothing but raw adrenaline and need.

  It turned her stupid.

  So stupid, in fact, that Dana forgot Tormid wasn’t the only shifter she was facing down.

  Two of the others collided with her at the same time. Dana had trained in being pinned like this, arms twisted behind her back, and her instincts carried her through. She brought her legs up. She kicked them away harder than she’d intended. There was a lot of potential power in the dead springs of a vampire’s thighs; she was shocked to see them go flying.

  But not so shocked that she could stop obsessing over Tormid’s blood.

  He cut himself again. It dripped, a river down his front.

  It smelled like life.

  She was so hungry.

  Dana tore through the other shifters, backhanding them, elbowing them, sending them flying into pumps and walls. The way that the sewers shook made her think everything was going to come tumbling down. She couldn’t get control of herself, so she couldn’t even appreciate the slow-motion way that concrete dust showered around her, creating expanding circles on the water under her feet, tipping Tormid’s hair in white.

  She could only think about draining him.

  He opened his arms to her as she raced closer.

  “Come here,” Tormid said. “I know you want it.”

  She did want it.

  So badly that she almost didn’t realize he was holding the wooden stake again.

  Even when Dana caught a glimpse of it, she still didn’t give it any thought. She didn’t even think about how suspicious it was that Tormid would passively wait for a vampire to drink his blood.

  As she ran, her necklace bounced against her chest. It lifted briefly in front of her eyes. The triadist charm caught the light, and its mirrored surface shined the blood at her.

  You don’t want to drink from him.

  Dana’s soul balked.

  She stopped. Dug her heels in.

  “No,” Dana whispered.

  “What’s that you said?” Tormid still had the knife in his other hand. He drew it across his wrist, creating a crimson line of fresh blood that smelled like baseball-game hot dogs, a whole keg of beer, like Penny’s sweat when she’d been working in the forge. All those delicious, irresistible things that turned Dana to putty.

  Except this wasn’t Penny’s sweat or a good beer, but blood.

  Still, Dana took another step. And another.

  Then she gripped the triadist charm so hard that its edges dug into her palm and stopped. “No,” she said again, louder, more forcefully. Foots
teps heralded another attack from the shifters. She elbowed the nearest of them in the face without looking back, then stuck out her leg to throw a second over her hip. She snarled at Tormid. “I’m not going to drink your fucking blood, you stupid bird!”

  He raised his voice. “The fight’s over. Stop.” He tossed both stake and knife aside.

  “What?” Dana asked. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Tormid said. “You’re strong enough to work with me.”

  “I didn’t even get around to killing any of you.”

  “Exactly.” He wiped a hand down his neck, exposing clean, healed skin underneath. “You’re already stronger than half of the Paradisos without training. You can resist blood. And that means we can work together.”

  After that, Dana finally got dressed. She stole a baggy pair of jeans from one of the shifters. Another shifter, Harald, donated an oversized tee. Dana looked extra butch dressed in men’s clothes, and had she not been vampire-pale, she’d have thought it was pretty sexy.

  “These pumps belong to the Paradisos,” Dana said, leading Tormid to the Gaslight Corp pumps she’d found last time that she was held captive by the shifters.

  Baraek sniffed the air. “Smells like snakeskin and human blood. Vampires have been here recently. Very recently.” He stooped onto the ground next to the pump, running his hand over the concrete. “The sewer water has washed much of it away, but there was blood here.”

  “I checked the water supply in the area after I spotted this shit,” Dana said. “This pump alone covers a couple blocks in the Fremont Street area.”

  “So this is what Mohinder is doing with the silver.” Tormid radiated fury, his golden eyes so hot on the pumps that it seemed like they should have caught fire. “He’s going to poison us all.”

  “Slow your roll,” Dana said. “I’m pretty sure that’s the plan, but if it is, he’ll need to poison a bigger geographic area to have a real impact. There must be more pumps. We need to find them. I’ve been trying to pick off his guys in my corners of the sewer, but—”

  “Your corners?” Harald asked.

  “I’ve been hanging out down here for days. I’ve claimed some spots as mine. Like this.” Dana fished around in a cubby behind the Gaslight Corp pumps. It must have looked like her arm was vanishing into the wall; she’d used a glamour to conceal the hole so that nobody would steal her supplies.

  When she pulled her hand out again, she was holding a sword.

  The shifters leaped back. “Whoa!”

  “I don’t smell you around here,” Tormid said.

  “I do, but the smell’s old,” Baraek said. “Days old.”

  “I’ve been here more recently than that. This morning, actually. You think a human hunter isn’t gonna have some tricks up her sleeve to make sure that she can’t be hunted back?” The only reason Dana had been able to keep on equal footing with preternaturals as a mundane was because of her resourcefulness.

  “Did you lure us here to kill us?” Tormid asked, turning his deadly glower on the sword. “Is this just an elaborate trick?”

  “Yes,” Dana deadpanned.

  She turned the sword around and buried it in her own gut.

  It didn’t cut.

  This was Wardbreaker—the magical blade that Penny had forged from such powerful enchantments that it had lost physical form. It looked like a normal sword. But the only tangible part of it was the hilt.

  “The blade can only cut magic,” Dana said with a mischievous grin, tugging the sword out of herself again. “That’s why these pumps are no longer enchanted. I cut through the protective wards with my blade this morning. If you guys wanna remove the pumps, be my guest—there’s no magic left to kill you.”

  “But Mohinder has enchanted the other pumps?” Tormid asked.

  Dana nodded. “I assume as much, but I haven’t been able to find them. That’s why I need your help.”

  Tormid turned to Harald and Baraek. “Get some of the other guys to help you sweep the city. Kill any vampire you see—except for Dana,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “Meet back at the throne room at midnight.”

  Dana snorted. “Throne room.”

  “I know,” Tormid said, rolling his eyes as his men loped away. “I haven’t forgiven you for siding with Nissa, McIntyre. I hope you know that I can’t ever trust you again.”

  “Full honesty: I haven’t forgiven myself either. And I’m not gonna trust myself again either. Next time I get the urge to be nice to someone, I’ll kick that urge in the nuts.”

  “Speaking of kicks to the nuts…” Tormid shot her an especially venomous look. He hadn’t forgotten what Dana did to him in the fight. Apparently slitting one’s throat was cool, but getting a boot to the junk wasn’t.

  Dana returned his expression with a blank stare. “All’s fair in forging alliances and ball-busting.”

  “These violent delights have violent ends,” Tormid said. “You’ll never make real friends with this attitude. No matter how many enemies you kill, how many lives you save, and how many cities you protect, you’ll always be alone as long as you remain a class-A bitch.”

  “How sad, boo-hoo, I weep for my loneliness,” Dana said. “Now let’s talk Vampire Vegas. It’s opening tonight, don’t you know?”

  “I know,” Tormid said. “Even if I hadn’t heard Mohinder talking about it for years, I would know. The advertisement washes down here and clogs up the drains. If that’s how much they’ve spent promoting it, I can only imagine the security spend. Mohinder probably expects me to rally against him. I’m not risking my pack like that.”

  “Don’t be a wuss,” Dana said. “Don’t you think Vampire Vegas looks fun? There’s gonna be that dance floor with the bubble pool, that big fish tank, all those liquid decorations…all those vampires shriveling away into permanent death…” She fished around in her sports bra and pulled out one of the vials of Garlic Shot. “You wanna be my date to the party? No hetero.”

  Tormid burst out laughing. “You have a way with words, McIntyre. All right. Let’s go to Vampire Vegas.”

  10

  “Dana is alive.” Penny announced this with all the certainty of someone who had witnessed the resurrection of Lazarus himself.

  Charmaine was slightly more skeptical.

  “Look, I can see why you’d think that, but…” Gods, how was Charmaine supposed to go about telling a widow that her estranged wife wasn’t alive under any circumstances? She was undead at the best. And undead wasn’t good where Dana McIntyre was concerned.

  Charmaine had spent the whole ride back to Holy Nights Cathedral trying to think of how she was going to handle this conversation with Penny. Anthony had warned her that the Hunting Club was going through some serious “Elvis lives” stuff with Dana. Tinfoil hats abounded, especially since the Garlic Shots had gone missing.

  “I know how it sounds,” Penny said, sitting on the pew next to Charmaine. “You must think I’m crazy or naïve or—”

  “You’ve got good reason to think that,” Charmaine said.

  Penny perked up again. “Right. And so I’ve been looking for this book—it’s an ebook, actually, and it was never published officially—which was written by someone who claims that they were a vampire before Genesis.”

  “A vampire before Genesis? Really?” Charmaine hadn’t thought there was any such thing.

  “I can’t prove that they are who they say they are, but I did get the book,” Penny said. “The book is real even if the vampire isn’t, and it has theories about curing vampirism. Did you know that they get more than just energy from blood? They get everything—a little bit of everything that the victim ate, what medicine they take—”

  “Penny.”

  “So if a vampire drinks from someone who’s had enough apotropaics, like garlic, then it can sometimes poison the vampire who drinks. It made me think: if the Garlic Shot is deadly to full-blooded vampires, what would it do filtered through the blood of a human? We could experiment with it. We
might still be able to turn Dana human again. So if—”

  “Penny, just because we suspect Dana’s not gone doesn’t mean we can find her,” Charmaine said. “Not if she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Penny just set her shoulders with a determined slant. “The police have resources the Hunting Club doesn’t. You have trackers that even we can’t use! If she’s using contraband magic, then you’ll be able to see it.”

  “Normally I would.” Charmaine sighed, leaning back in the pew. Was it her imagination, or were the gods on the mural scowling at her? “The problem is that…” Oh fuck, it was hard to admit it, even with someone who was as good a friend as Penny. “My office has been taken over by the undersecretary of the OPA. I can’t set foot in that building without asking his permission first.”

  Penny wilted. “Oh. The OPA are here.” The arrival of the OPA was grim news for Penny. Whether Dana was still a blood virgin or had gone to the dark side, the OPA setting up Vegas for a daylighting would be fatal.

  Penny was trembling, like she might start crying. “But there might still be a cure. There’s still hope.”

  Charmaine put her arm around the orc. It felt kind of silly, trying to comfort a woman so much bigger. It was like attempting to reassure a boulder. “We can’t be sure Dana’s still out there. There are alternative explanations for what could have happened to the Garlic Shots and Wardbreaker. Don’t you think Dana would have contacted you by now if she were alive?”

  “Not if what Nissa Royal said was true. If Dana had drunk blood…if she’d turned…” Her face fell into her hands. “Dana wouldn’t want me to see her like that. And not only can we not use police resources to track her, the OPA is going to light up the city and kill her for sure.”

  “The OPA is still trying to decide if such drastic measures are necessary. I promise you, Penny, I’m working my ass off to keep control of the city as best I can.” But she sure as hell felt like a failure now, knowing that Cèsar Hawke would be sitting at her desk right at that moment, pretending to be a nice guy while he was pillaging her department.